Thanks to Iceland's volcanic ash cloud, we're again obsessed with vapor — clouds, mists, fogs, steam, chemical gas warfare, the miasma theory of disease — in fact, with just about any aerosolized matter like sandstorms, carcinogenic dust clouds of asbestos, crowd control tear gas, climate change smog and forests atomized through slash and burning. One could devote an entire blog just on this topic alone without running out of material, as anything could probably be vaporized, given a couple of thermonuclear bombs or a supernova or some apparition lessons at Hogwarts.
If one were indeed to start such a blog (perhaps called Pathological Aerology in imitation of the awesome Pathological Geomorphology), there definitely should be an entry on Juliet Haysom's Spring.
The proposal of which having won the Jerwood Sculpture Prize in 2007, Spring was permanently installed the following year at Ragley Hall, a stately country house near Stratford-upon-Avon in England.
Quoting Haysom:
Researching my proposal for the Jerwood Sculpture Prize brief, I realized that Ragley Hall is situated above one of England's most significant aquifers. About 40 percent of Severn and Trent Water's supply comes from this vast subterranean water resource, as do the celebrated springs at nearby Malvern, Leamington Spa and Burton on Trent.
Rather than construct and import something into the park, my proposal involved drilling a borehole into the aquifer below the site. Water from the borehole would be then pumped to the surface where it would appear as a cloud of fine mist. Spring's external form and appearance will vary significantly depending on weather and light conditions.
In other words, when early morning sunlight begins hitting the nearby solar panels that power the water pumps, the mist will slowly start to appear. At midday, the cloud will have expanded. When it's sunny, it will create a tower of mist, a sort of shimmering tree. If it's overcast or windy, however, its form will become tenuous, more spectral. If there's a rainstorm, then it will dissolve into the pouring rain.
As evening approaches and the light dims, Spring will dull down until vanishing completely for the night.
Quoting Haysom again:
While at first glance Spring might look like a natural phenomenon, on close inspection the form of its jets and the presence of nearby solar panels will reveal the fact that it is a man-made intervention into the landscape. The parkland at Ragley Hall is similarly deceptive; its rolling hills, informal stands of trees and picturesque lake were, in fact, designed by Capability Brown.
One of the towering figures of landscape architecture thus invoked, and along with him the monumentally rich history and traditions of garden design, it wouldn't be far off the mark to think Spring as a sort of avant-garde folly, a Greek temple vaporized and aerosolized against a sylvan backdrop to evoke the story of Jupiter and Io or the vaporous origins of the Centaurs.
Every weekend during the sweltering month of August, from 1652 until 1866, the drains of the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi were blocked so that the waters would overflow and flood much of Piazza Navona, a sort of aqueous reincarnation of the naumachiae, or mock naval battles, that were once staged on the same site more than a thousand years ago. Or perhaps this aberrant hydrology was an attempt to mimic the floodplains of the real Quattro Fiumi. It could even be described as the temporary, theatrical reemergence of the marshy landscape on which the Eternal City was built.
In any case, it was one of the most popular midsummer festivals in Rome, the “merriest of them all,” according to the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Members of the nobility and gentry came in droves in their carriages. Watched by gazers crowding the shores of this artificial lake or looking out from the windows of the palaces surrounding the piazza, princes and nobles would parade side by side with peasants and farmers around and around the water's shallow periphery or crisscross across deeper parts. It probably didn't take long until the water became just a dirty puddle, but one could still churn up microgusts of cooling breezes. On the dry portions of the piazza, entertainments were set up, as well as booths for refreshments.
This urban hydro-spectacle would go on all day, until sunset, sometimes even into the night. Then the piazza was drained, and the water once again contained in its Baroque basin.
*
As a postscript to this postscript, check out Millennium Park's Crown Fountain, whose seasonal artificial lake swarms with hyperactive, overheated, giggle-infected kids (and adults) every summer.
Once a year, after a multi-million dollar renovation, the twin spouts of Crown Fountain will be allowed to gush out as though they were gigantic fire hoses, flooding the entire park. Frank Gehry's sunken pavilion becomes an inland sea in which concert goers ply the waters on gondolas. The Lurie Gardens transform into a wetland prairie. Anish Kapoor turns into an island. The new Nichols Bridgeway is repurposed as a water slide. And everywhere waterfalls cascade down Neoclassical stairs.
And still yet another installation at this year's International Garden Festival at Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens: with the caveat that we haven't yet seen any of the gardens in person — to repeat: not a single one — and thus we're only judging by image and text alone, our handicapped favorite is the entry by the team of Claudia Delisle, Karine Dieujuste, Philippe Nolet and Sami Tannoury.
“This garden,” they write, “takes its form from the most common garden tools: 66 sprinklers that remind us of the residential garden. This installation takes roots in the collective memory, reminding us of spontaneous childhood water games.”
Watery naves fleeting in and out of form. Infectiously joyous children and adults shooting through the spritely, melodically sputtering fountains, shrieking as if experiencing a kind of hydrological rapture — that is, until keeling over, comatosed from too much nostalgia of domestic bliss.
This installation is called Poule mouillée!, which can be loosely translated as: Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!
Here's a lovely piece of intervention by the Dutch artist Helmut Smits. A minor act but profoundly marvelous.
Smits briefly notes that his street fountain spurts via a small water pump. But how small is it, we wondered. How complex are its wirings and how great is its energy requirement? One certainly wishes that it could be mass produced, bought by the dozens, or at least hackable from easily procured cheap parts, a craft project whose step-by-step instructions can be downloaded from Instructables, like LED Throwies. When the rains do come and fill up pot holes or shallow pedestrian depressions, you can sow little fountains everywhere, adding a bit of playfulness to the concrete playgrounds of weary city-dwellers. It's Banksy meets Salomon de Caus hydro-graffiti.
Should you want to add a subversive underlayer, you could say that at the same time it highlights the deplorable condition of urban infrastructure, that pouring in billions of dollars into these pot holes isn't going to solve the problem. The collapse is perpetual.
One of the interesting things — and there are definitely many — that you will read about in Kazys Varnelis' paean to the “networked ecologies” of Los Angeles, The Infrastructural City, is the dust control system at Owens Lake.
After decades of monumental water projects that have diverted the lake's “life-giving liquid” to quench a distant city's thirsty populace, to ensure the perfect shade of green for their lawns, and to turn their swimming pools into aqueous micro-paradises, the now parched lake has become a health hazard.
Wind gusts above twenty miles an hour lifted over fifty tons per second of “Keeler Fog” off the lakebed. Often reaching over two miles high, these dust storms sent 130 times the United States Environmental Protection Agency's limit for particulate matter into the atmosphere, blowing the dust over 250 miles from the lake. Such storms occurred two dozens or more times each year, generally in the spring and fall. Composed of microscopic particles smaller than ten microns (PM10), the dust contains significant levels of toxic metals like selenium, arsenic, and lead along with efflorescent salts. The largest single source of PM10 pollution in the country, these dust storms were a clear threat to the 40,000 people in the immediate region.
The threat, according to Lehrman, came in the form of higher rates of cancer, respiratory disease, and eye problems.
To combat these carcinogenic storms, Los Angeles grafted onto the desiccated corpse of the lake a hydro-network as monumental as the existing network responsible for the situation it is tasked to offset: “over 300 miles of pipe (some as large as five feet in diameter), more than 5,000 irrigation bubblers, and hundreds of miles of fiber optic control cables and valves.”
[T]he dust control projects on Owens Lake is roughly equivalent to that of a waterworks for a city of over 220,000 people. Construction of the first five phases, treating the worst thirty square miles of dust-emitting soils on the playa, has cost the City of Los Angeles $425 million dollars to build. But that sum doesn't factor in the lost revenue from the water being appropriated for the project (around $15 million/year) or the operations and maintenance budget, some $10 million per year.
“[R]ising like alien plants on the terraformed lakebed,” the bubblers flood the playa with shallow water, creating the merest suggestion of a lake, a perverse reminder of Lake Owens' former self.
However superficial such observations may be, we couldn't help but see similarities between these bubblers and fountains.
Firstly, much like the fountains at Versailles, behind these water spouts is a staggering hydrological infrastructure. Among other things, Versailles had the Machine de Marley, considered the greatest engineering marvel of its time; Owens Lake is part of what is probably the greatest water engineering project of the 20th century.
Secondly, since time immemorial, fountains have been creating micro-climates, cooling gardens, palaces and sartorially bedecked aristocrats. The array of bubblers, you could say, is also a type of weather modification system: an anti-dust storm. Moreover, fountains like those at Columbus Circle in Manhattan can provide a sonic barrier, making one unaware of the tumult outside; with some conjecture, probably forced, you could say that the bubblers don't do much to make Los Angelenos more aware of the negative environmental effects their mode of living is contributing outside the city.
Thirdly, if one can only speculate that fountains have ameliorative effects on one's mental state, you probably don't need to speculate the positive health effects of the bubblers.
Fourthly, fountains like those in Rome are objects for aesthetic consumption; these ebullient and rather photogenic desert sprinklers, thanks to CLUI, have been appropriated into a staged aesthetic experience.
Lastly, and most significantly, they are the products of a complex network of intermingling social, technological, political, economic and geographical conditions, the manifestations of competing ideologies and agendas. They're not mere water features, in other words.
Something about the Tiber River nearly breaching its banks and nearly submerging Rome in torrents and mud earlier this month reminded us of an antipode event last year. It's one of our favorite stories that entire year.
As reported by Reuters, “water supplying Rome's world-famous Trevi Fountain was cut off when a builder across town damaged a 2,000-year-old pipe.” Luckily enough for the carabinieri who might have had a riotous mob of tired, sweat-drenched tourists on their hands, the fountain didn't dry out; it simply recycled the water already in its basin. Unfortunately, “many smaller Rome fountains spluttered to a halt.” Equally unfortunate, we didn't hear too much of pissed-off Germans and English hydro-hooligans ransacking museums and pillaging nearby archaeological sites.
But what could have caused these minor urban disasters?
A search using a waterborne video camera through the ancient pipe tracked the blockage to a house in the high-end Parioli neighborhood on the other side of the Villa Borghese park, where builders were making a private underground car park.
A spokesman for the [local] water company said the builder had broken the pipe, then tried to mend it with concrete, but instead had filled it in.
Interconnected narratives of spaces, infrastructures, people, histories — all of that — all incredibly fascinating.
But we weren't satisfied with how the story ended (the water was temporarily diverted to a “younger pipe” while repairs were being done): so let's concoct some plot points for the pilot episode of, say, CSI: Rome. Let's imagine that a body has been encased in that concrete.
To solve this murder case, an obscenely photogenic forensic cartographer must map out the Eternal City's subterranean trash heap of functioning and disused aqueducts. Is it a simple mafia hit or is it something more deliciously sinister, a more expansive, twist-n-turny mystery that can be story arced through an entire season, even the whole run of the series?
“Follow the flow,” orders his supervisor.
However, he soon realizes that the technology at his disposable can't possibly do such a complex task. He calls 811, but no one answers, and it's not even lunch time. “So Italian,” he grumbles, in Italian.
Desperate, he makes a call to the Italian subsidiary of some leading global research company to see if they can supply him with advance technology. He knows that it'll be tit-for-tat, that at an unannounced later date, they will call in their favor and he will have to oblige them unconditionally, he is still willing to go into a bargain. Primetime televisual exposition requires that the company immediately procures for him exactly the right tools for the job: he is given a batch of RFID-tagged robo-spiders and dedicated access to their private fleet of spy satellites.
The mapping begins. Large sets of numbers are uploaded, downloaded and then crunched by supercomputers. Slowly, Rome's negative voids get digitally unearthed.
So begin as well those disembodied whispers, furtive glances from strangers in the streets, vague feelings that the contents of his office desk have been messed about. Up in those gilded residences of Parioli, a curtain parts slightly each time he comes by to conduct his investigation. There are forces working to derail him, but there are also others who want his map completed. But why?
During one espresso-filled night, he gets his first major break in the case: from out of that rhizomatic mess of ancient and modern hydro-infrastructure, a pattern emerges...
In keeping with today's theme of antics and tomfoolery, above is an image of the Fontana di Venere at Villa d'Este, Tivoli, and below is an image of another fountain at the villa, the Teatro e Fontana della Civetta.
Made by Giovanni Francesco Venturini in 1691 and digitized by Catena, the Digital Archive of Historic Gardens and Landscapes, they are two of the best illustrations available online showing a giochi d'acqua in action.
Giochi d'acqua were water jets concealed between paving slabs, in benches, staircases and statues. Controlled by gardeners behind the scenes, these hidden little fountains would sprinkle unsuspecting visitors, catching them off-guard. One minute they're enjoying the genteel pleasantries of a garden walk and the next minute they're scampering about in their fineries, frantically searching for an escape, if there is one.
With the spigots in the hands of the lascivious, women could get a titillating squirt up their dresses or get completely soaked from a puti's simulated urine or other.
Replace the water with battery acid and you could have the penultimate setting of Indiana Jones V or Tomb Raider III. Not in the Mayan jungles of the Yucatan or steamy Angkor Wat but in a sun-drenched papal garden of Tuscany. It's an anxious space under constant threat of eruptions.
In any case, these whimsical water features — which really were an astoundingly complex network of hydraulics — were common in Mannerist Italian gardens, since they provided the element of surprise, an important feature of any mannerist work.
We rather liked collecting our posts on agricultural landscapes into one, so we'd like to do the same with our posts on fountains, in reverse chronological order.
On Michael Cross' Bridge, a sort of interactive reflecting pool from which an outbreak of messianic prophecies, marian visions and apocalyptic auguries will precipitate.
On some selections from the Visual Images Database of the Mississippi Valley Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers. Because is not the heavily controlled Mississippi River really just a fountain writ-large?
Public Fountain by Charles Goldman is a “self-contained, portable and solar powered fountain. It is designed to bring the gathering point — that the traditional urban fountain often is — into the city's more tangential zones.”
Of course, there needs to be an army of autonomous Goldman fountains, self-aware and self-driven water features in a continuous balletic performance on the streets and sidewalks and all of the public spaces of Manhattan, replicating above ground the island's subterranean channels of sewage and contaminated hydrology, forming geometries and patterns that only the bastard petri dish love child of Busby Berkeley and Piet Mondrian can imagine.
It's a deterrestrialized river-on-wheels.
In unairconditioned neighborhoods where hacking fire hydrants is a favorite and necessary summertime activity, they spurt a refreshing frothy gaiety.
And in trash-hewn alleys and neglected parks, they offer respite — an oasis in the urban desert — to the homeless, drug addicts and prostitutes.
Or maybe they will render E8. That will be the most awesome public fountain ever!
It's All Hallows Eve once again, and this year, for my costume, I've decided to replicate Nicholas de Larmessin's design for the Fountain Maker's Costume. It may at first seem insufficiently frightful and quite campy, like Louis XV's high heels or an ancien régime beauty spot.
However, once I tell people that though the spraying jets and frothy pools are mere representations in generic cardboard but back at home all the faucets have been turned on at full flush — i.e., for such frivolity and hydrological gaiety, Lake Michigan is presently being drained of its clean waters wastefully, while the American South and Southwest are in the midst of a historic drought; while children in developing countries are dying due to the lack of accessible freshwater; mothers in China are giving birth to infants with mental defects because they had drunk tainted water; while genocide brought on by drought erupts in parts of the world; while aquifers everywhere are getting drained faster than it can be replenished, the imbalance of which will result in the collapse of global food security; and while Las Vegas and Phoenix want to turn Canada's river rich western territories into a desert.
When all this has been said, when people realize that they've wasted 30 minutes listening to me when they could have spend all that time drinking and whoring, they will surely be horrified by my Larmessin couture.
A group calling itself the ATM Azionefuturista 2007 has turned one of Rome's most famous monuments into a bloodied protest canvas.
One of its members, in full Futurist glee, “threw a bucket of red paint or dye into Rome's Trevi Fountain on Friday, coloring the waters of the 18th-century monument bright red in front of a crowd of astonished tourists and residents.”
The man escaped, leaving the fountain, which normally runs on a closed cycle, spouting red water. Police arrived and technicians briefly shut off the water before restoring a clear flow.
Experts said the baroque fountain was not permanently damaged and the marble statues depicting the sea deity Neptune on his chariot had not absorbed the color.
At first I thought the guy read an advance copy of The New York Times Magazine's extended report on the neverending water problems of the American Southwest, and so was compelled to carry out this guerrilla attack to highlight the impending climate change disaster to an audience of intensive carbon-producing tourists. Like a self-righteous Moses to a bunch of uber-consumerist Ramesseses.
But alas, based on leaflets found nearby, officials think that he was simply protesting against the “expenses incurred in organizing the Rome Film Festival.” The red waters of the Trevi, then, “symbolically referred to the event's red carpet.”
It was one simple gesture by one person, but the whole world has taken notice. So perhaps next year, another famous fountain will be made to spew vermillion waters — or preferably, made to stagnate and concoct a toxic stew of fluorescent green algae — to successfully call international attention to our present shared hydrological crisis.
Since the fountain is constantly being monitored by CCTV cameras, there is a video of the incident:
In Jacques Leslie's prologue to his book Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment, excerpted here at AlterNet, we learn that “between Hoover and the end of the century, more than 45,000 large dams — dams at least five stories tall — were built in 140 countries” and that “the water behind them blots out a terrain bigger than California.” Moreover, Leslie writes that “by now the planet has expended two trillion dollars on dams — the equivalent of the entire 2003 U.S. government budget.”
But here's what could possibly be the most interesting trivia:
The world's dams have shifted so much weight that geophysicists believe they have slightly altered the speed of the earth's rotation, the tilt of its axis, and the shape of its gravitational field.
To repeat: altered the speed of the earth's rotation.
Slightly, that is. But even if the alteration amounts to a mere fraction of a second per day, that dams could shorten or lengthen a year obviously offers a possible solution to a perennial nuisance: earth-bound extinction level asteroids.
In other words, would a hydrological meganetwork of dams hasten the planet's solar orbital journey such that we arrive at the impact point in space and then depart before the asteroid has even arrived?
Trillions of dollars would have to be spent constructing thousands of dams on every river basins in the world, and many trillions more integrating them into urban stormwater management systems; wetland restoration projects; concretized rivers and irrigation channels; fortified lagoons and estuaries; abandoned tunnels; floodcontrolstructures; and every faucets, sprinklers, buckets and rolling 'hippos' throughout the world.
At scheduled times during the year, a transnational governing agency chartered to oversee this Super-Versailles would initiate a carefully programmed sequence of valve openings and closings, of inflows and outflows, of discharge and storage. In soporific trickles and raging Jovian torrents, great volumes of water are shifted across the surface of the earth, against gravity, by sheer human will.
And if the calculations prove correct and the hydrochoreography is followed precisely, the earth would then spin a little faster, and we finish the day and reach year's end early.
Over the course of decades, countless miniscule fractions of seconds are saved, albeit probably amounting to a few seconds. Nevertheless, that just might be enough for us to miss our appointment with the Apocalypse.
In the meantime, before we even know if the whole thing actually works, this apocalypse-averting great flush will be treated as the grand spectacle.
Everywhere fountains will spurt with a little bit more mirth and whimsy. Fireworks will lighten up the night skies over the Three Gorges Dam and Aswan Dam, and barbecue pits will be lit beside a raging Los Angeles River. It'll be the only truly international holiday.
Meanwhile, travelers equipped with the latest edition of The Lonely Planet Guide to Super-Versailles will trek to the Aral Sea, the marshes of southern Iraq, the Everglades or and Owens Lake to witness these ancient landscapes get rehydrated with waters from Greenland's ice caps. To coincide with this event, the local tourist agency will stage a naumachia re-enacting The Deluge.
Those with Fodor's will visit picturesque Venice; those with more adventurous spirit and shun guidebooks at will rappel down behind Niagara Falls.
But most importantly, all the Great Water Wars are averted and resolved.
Living in Indonesia must be very trying these days: “First came the 2004 tsunami. Then Indonesia was afflicted by the Merapi volcano and a major earthquake in Yogyakarta. Now, a heavily populated region of East Java has been consumed by an unstoppable 'mud volcano' that may have been caused by a gas- and oil-drilling project.”
“The geyser,” we are told (in fantastically descriptive prose, by the way), “bubbles, gurgles and occasionally emits loud bursts, constantly spurting steaming, inky dark mud from the bowels of the earth. The putrid stench is sometimes interspersed with the odor of petroleum. The plume occasionally contains larger amounts of hydrogen sulfide, producing sulfur's telltale odor of rotten eggs.”
But no one knows for certain what's causing the eruption; how long it will continue; who's to blame, i.e., how much is the drilling company to blame; and how to stop it. If anything, it may take “[m]ore than 100 magicians, shamans, and witches,” the “Queen of Bali,” and “hordes of engineers and scientists” to plug the hole.
In a totally unrelated but nevertheless visually related event, here finally is the answer to a long-standing question here on Pruned: what if Busby Berkeley had a handful of depth charges?
And still yet another completely different but visually related phenomenon, “geysers spewing sand and dust hundreds of feet into the 'air' have been discovered on Mars.”
All they need now are some “environmentally sound” boardwalk, one or two interplanetary park rangers, and vacationing Martian terraformers.
The cacophony you're presently hearing is the recursive, strengthening screaming of “Marvelous!” echoing through Pruned Headquarters for Bridge, a site-specific installation by Michael Cross.
“Housed in a former church,“ a project statement reads, “the piece comprises submerging two thirds of the inside of the church in water, and producing a series of steps which rise out of the apparently empty man-made ‘lake’ as you walk across them. Each step emerges one step in front of you and disappears back underneath behind you as you go. This ‘bridge’ is purely mechanical, the weight of the person on it depresses each step a little, this force activates a submerged mechanism which raises the next step.”
And yes, in what will certainly precipitate an outbreak of messianic prophecies, marian visions and apocalyptic auguries, “the public are invited to walk out on it as if walking on water, eventually reaching the middle of the lake, thirty steps and twelve meters from the shore. There they will stand alone and detached, stranded in the middle of a plane of water until they choose to return the way they came. For some people this experience of being cut off and surrounded by water will be peaceful, for others terrifying. For some walking across the water will be pure childish joy, whilst others will be too scared to try.”
Meanwhile, we are forced to quote a few biblical passages on the redemptive and sublime qualities of water.
As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. (Psalms 42:1)
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. (Psalms 32:1-2)
Save me, O God; for the waters are come into my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me. (Psalms 69:1-2)
A trailing suction hopper dredger, or TSHD, is the sort of seafaring vessel you would want to buy if you plan to rehabilitate dying beaches, fortify riverbanks, recontour ports and harbors, construct offshore multi-terminal airports or send marauding bacterio-peninsulas to unsuspecting shorelines.
It should surprise no one, then, that we want to comandeer about a dozen of them. If Michael Heizer had his bulldozers and James Turrell is having fun with his tunnel boring machines, we should be able to play around with our own earth-moving machines.
As but one of certainly many possibilities, we could use them to stage an utterly marvelous water show in the grand tradition of the naumachia, those monumental re-enactments in Ancient Rome of epic naval battles. Obviously, we would first need to reincarnate Busby Berkeley to help with the script, tentatively titled Adventures on the Continental Shelf.
In semi-accordance with ancient practices, it will be performed entirely by a cast of quasi-slaveworkers from Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Bangladesh. The Army Corps of Engineers will help with the art direction, and the Naval War College will provide the choreography.
Months later the ridiculously wealthy and the grotesquely (in)famous will head off to Abu Dhabi (Dubai is so old news) for the world premier. With their 67-course Alinea dinner finished and the Veuve Clicquot now flowing freely, they will watch the armada glide across the moonlit Persian Gulf in interlacing figure eights and arabesque battle formations, arcing chunks of the mantle and patterning a frothy trail within sights of U.S. aircraft carriers and heavy battlecruisers guarding vital oil shipping lanes. A hydrological fantasie staged in a geopolitical minefield.
Stone against metal against water. Their bones will tremble with the ambient vibrations.
It's better than the Bellagio, they will say to themselves. Because any slight misalignment of the nozzle and their heads get sandblasted off from their torsos.
During intermission, someone will go up to a group of totalitarian dictators awaiting their future micronations and ask, was Pruned inspired by the Battle of Leyte Gulf?
The next day, hung over and with a mouthful of grit, they will step onto their manmade continent and set about showing those petulant Modernists and New Urbanists the proper way to build a thriving city without the ahistorical mimicry.
Or maybe it's a game. You are given a tiny speck of an island and there waiting for you is a set of groynes, sea walls, revetments, rip raps, gabions, breakers and a multi-billion dollar levee system. The challenge is in the assembly (perhaps Ikea would like to sign on as a sponsor), and whoever keeps their island above sea level the longest, wins.
Meanwhile, in case you're wondering, a trailing suction hopper dredger operates very much like a floating vacuum cleaner. With a single or twin proboscis-like suction pipes, it pumps up materials from the sea floor and then discharges them into a storage compartment known as the hopper. You wouldn't find a land version of the TSHD cruising the arid expanses of the Arabian Peninsula sucking up desert sand, because apparently, unlike sand taken from the bottom of the ocean, desert sand isn't materially and structurally suitable for making artificial islands.
After filling up its hopper, the dredger would then sail to the disposal site where it unloads its cargo either by 1) opening the doors or valves in the hopper bottom; 2) using a pipeline running from the ship to the site; 3) or using a special bow jet. This last technique is known as rainbowing.
In case you're wondering as well, most of the dredgers shown in this post are owned by Van Oord, purportedly the largest dredging company in the world. The others are either owned by Boskalis, Jan de Nul or Dredging International.
Would it surprise anyone to learn that these four companies are based in the Netherlands and Belgium, that these two countries — most of whose territories were reclaimed from the seas — have a near monopoly in TSHDs?
Standing beneath a roaring froth of regurgitated geology. Loveliness.
At the moment, there are only two simple ways to interact with the Smart Fountain™: 1) shake your feet to frighten it away, and 2) wiggle your fingers to coax it back to a vigorous spout.
But no doubt more gestures and motion capture algorithms are in the works, and soon you'll be dancing like Michael Jackson during his glory days, like a conjurer of phantasmagorical aquatic tricks.
Or a rain-soaked Gene Kelly channeling a frolicking Anita Ekberg channeling a delectable Esther Williams in a frothy Busby Berkeley musical extravaganza. With any fountain in any park anywhere. Or with the Mississippi River. Reenact the riotous passages of The Rite of Spring and the Yangtze River prematurely bursts through the floodgates of the Three Gorges Dam.
1) Vicksburg Harbor Project, Warren County, Mississippi. Operation of East Retaining Dike Spillway Hydraullic Fill Control Sturcture, with 35 logs in place. Elevation of top of logs, 105.5, MSL. Pool elevation, 101.2, MSL. Photo taken by U.S. Army Engineer District, Vicksburg, Corps of Engineers, February 3, 1960. Photo file #A9/1145.
2) Vicksburg Harbor Project, Warren County, Mississippi. Construction of industrial fill, habor and approach channels by hired labor and leased dredge. Outlet end of Hydraulic Fill Control Structure. Six stop logs in place, 36 inches high. Dredge leased from: Jahncke Service, Inc. Contract No. DA-22-052-CIVENG-59-450, dated 13 February 1959. Funds: Flood Control, Mississippi River & Tributaries. Allotment: 1255-09. Photo taken by U.S. Army Engineer District, Vicksburg, Corps of Engineers, January 11, 1960. Photo file #A9/1140.
3) This post has been on queue for months, gathering a thick layer of dust. And it looks as though I've waited far too long to write it, since the Visual Images Database of the USACE Mississippi Valley Division is now defunct. Perhaps it's been relocated or maybe undergoing some maintenance, but its link on the homepage has certainly been deleted. It was listed under Information > Documents & Photos, but it's gone. I've sent several emails, of course, but have yet to receive a reply.
If it seems as though I'm freaking out, I am, because the archive contained some of the best publicly accessible, i.e. free, historical B&W photographs of hydrological engineering out there. Or simply the best B&Ws. And at print-ready high resolution! In fact, one could easily confect a high caliber museum exhibit to make fans of Edward Burtynski and David Maisel catatonic with awesomeness.
4) Fortunately, I've downloaded quite a few images, of which fifteen appear here. And you can check out all the originals on Flickr Pruned where they are titled according to their file ID number.
Unfortunately, except for two labels shown above, I didn't think to copy and paste the others. So now I'm not sure which project is which.
5) Still, there is no substitute for the original archive. You can't recreate the joy of witnessing the Mississippi — and all its arterial tributaries, streams, and rivulets, its watersheds, floodplains, and wetlands — barricaded, recontoured, rebared, channelized, angled, and tiled with merely the force of will of the Army Corps of Engineers into a network of levees and dams. An intricate choreography between concrete, earth, water, and gravity. Indeed quite possibly the greatest Theatrum Machinarum in the world. (Or should that be one giant Rube Goldberg contraption — a single misalignment and the entire intercontinental infrastructure suffers complete critical failure?)
6) But in the event of a catastrophe, monitoring stations and several detachments of scouting patrols — proto-nervous and immune systems, if you will — up and down the length of the river should alert central command immediately. Which leads me to wonder: 1,000 years from now, when the entire expanse of the Mississippi River Valley has been fully mechanized and automated, its constituent drainage basins computerized and overseen by a central Pentagon AI, will the entire thing suddenly become self-aware? After shaking off some trees, cows, and people, will it just get up and go? The long captive bastard child of Mary Shelley and the Army Corps of Engineers, creeping about the earth with only vengeance on its mind. Or perhaps a benevolent Alluvial Ent, off to visit his good friends the Yangtze, the Nile, the Rhine, the Po, and the Ganges-Bhramaputra, all by then as roboticized as the Mississippi. (Peter Jackson, are you reading this? Email me.)
7) And another thing: what would remain? A post-glacial, pre-Clovis Man landscape in which stormwater and groundwater go into a non-stop, frenetic search for lesser contour lines? Two things are for certain though: a) the Army will be there to start defying gravity and geology all over again; and b) Pruned will also be there to blog it all.
8) Meanwhile, here are three quotes that seem to have collected themselves in this post as it awaited publication:
a) In his book The Control of Nature, John McPhee quotes James B. Eads, who the author describes as “probably one of the most brilliant engineer who has ever addressed his attention to the Mississippi River”: “[E]every atom that moves onward in the river, from the moment it leaves its home among the crystal springs or mountain snows, throughout the fifteen hundred leagues of its devious pathway, until it is finally lost in the vast waters of the Gulf, is controlled by laws as fixed and certain as those which direct the majestic march of the heavenly spheres. Every phenomenon and apparent eccentricity of the river—its scouring and depositing action, its caving banks, the formation of the bars at its mouth, the effect of the waves and tides of the sea upon its currents and deposits—is controlled by law as immutable as the Creator, and the engineer need only to be insured that he does not ignore the existence of any of these laws, to feel positively certain of the results he aims at.”
8b) But apparently these engineers are not of the god-fearing sort and so undertook a frontal assault against the Creator: “This nation has a large and powerful adversary. Our opponent could cause the United States to lose nearly all her seaborne commerce, to lose her standing as first amongst trading nations... We are fighting Mother Nature... It's a battle we have to fight day by day, year by year; the health of our economy depends on victory.”
8c) BLDGBLOGexplains it a little clearer: “It's too easy, not to mention slightly vindictive, to blame all of hurricane Katrina's catastrophic impact and aftermath on the Army Corps of Engineers; but it is worth remembering that New Orleans – in fact the near totality of the lower Mississippi delta – is a manmade landscape that has become, over the last century at least, something of a military artifact. To say that New Orleans is, today, under martial law, is therefore almost redundant: its very landscape, for at least the last century, has never been under anything *but* martial law. The lower Mississippi delta is literally nothing less than landscape design by army hydrologists.”
9) One final thing: looking at all these monumental earth-moving hydroengineering, is it possible that entire mountain ranges from who knows where, maybe Canada, Peru or even China, may have been blasted to bits and then shipped off to the Midwest? A futures market in mountains, something to exacerbate debilitating trade imbalance with China? Maybe not, but I particularly like the image of a whole Andean mountain passing through the Panama Canal on a Panamax supertanker. Ghosts of dead Land Art artists haunting its slopes. Rolling boulders up to the summit. And of an entire Chinese mountain, 1/10000th of the Himalayas, holding back the Mississippi in the guise of a Native American burial mound.
10) So whether it is a hydropolitical war or a religious war or a trade war or whatever, Visual Images Database has documented it all, making it one of the greatest repository of photojournalism out there.
